CA
"ca" is a 2-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“CA” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #2,148) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #2,148
- frequency rank, English
- 5,599
- “C” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Initialism of cellular automaton.
Corpus desk
Index EN-ca · CA · English
CA · rank #2,148 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #2,148
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,599
- PHOTO-FINISH Boston
Nearest frequency peer: Boston (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Frequency neighbours of confusable “CA”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- appropriate
appropriate
97,856 corpus weight
- artists
artists
97,855 corpus weight
- Boston
Boston
97,854 corpus weight
- CA
CA
97,853 corpus weight
- confirmed
confirmed
97,852 corpus weight
- device
device
97,851 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “CA” against nearest ranked English headwords, not a reprint of the confusable-pair desk.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | CA |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #2,148 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “CA”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for CA is neighbouring look-alikes ("co", "CD", …), not just typos; it is anoun. Frequency #2,148 among 5,599 “C” headwords. 13 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for CA, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "co", "CD", "CM", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct English form is CA, spelled C-A.
Definition
- 1Initialism of cellular automaton.
- 2Initialism of certificate authority.
- 3Initialism of armored cruiser, a type of warship.
- 4Initialism of heavy cruiser, a variant of the cruiser type of warship.
- 5Initialism of civil affairs, a military occupational specialty or branch.
- 6Abbreviation of cyanoacrylate.
- 7Initialism of chartered accountant.
- 8Initialism of cabin attendant.
- 9Initialism of central authority.
- 10Initialism of Companies Act.
- 11Initialism of communications assistant.
- 12Initialism of closed access, as opposed to open access.
- 13Initialism of conversation analysis.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how CA appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
BTW: Of course the rules were parametrised, so any totalistic 2-dimensional 9-neighbourhood CA could be run.
The new CA is a modification of Fredkin's earlier SALT architecture in which every cell is identified as either even or odd - as in sodium and chlorine in a salt crystal hence the name. The state of each cell is either up or down and the development rule simple takes account of states of odd and even neighbours. The up-date at each time step simply takes…
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.